Richard
07-01-2011, 08:48
"The United States needs a massive global force structure review and an entirely new National Security Strategy that guides a new QDR."
Richard :munchin
Kilo Alpha Yankee
LineOfDeparture, 1 Jul 2011
Today, our guest is Dr. Sean Kay, the Professor of Politics and Government and Chair of International Studies at Ohio Wesleyan University.
The thing about Sean is that he’s a whiz about several things most people don’t master singularly — missile policy, NATO, Irish economics and politics — and he has the added gift of being able to explain these complex issues to a layman like me.
The highest compliment I can ever pay anyone is “competent,” and if you read either his essays or his latest book on Ireland, Celtic Revival? The Rise, Fall and Renewal of Global Ireland, you’ll share that opinion.
He’s also on sabbatical, which means I could grab him after a 12-mile run and a cup of coffee. Irish luck for us!
Prine of Departure: Dia dhuit, Sean.
I thought we might begin by discussing NATO, a subject you’ve been studying now for three decades.
Everyone is focused on the alliance for three main reasons today: 1) An ongoing war in Afghanistan which has dragged our European friends into an unpopular conflict; 2) NATO’s leadership in the ongoing war against Libya’s government in Tripoli; and, 3) Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and his recent speech excoriating NATO members for failing to live up to his notions of their defense obligations.
I guess I’m reading this in different ways than most people. I hear from our European chums that the strategic calculus for them in Afghanistan — that the war over there will make them safer from terrorism — is the exact opposite of what transpired, and their people know it.
Moreover, NATO’s war in Libya is very unpopular to Americans! And complaining about defense spending by NATO members has dogged the alliance for, well, its entire existence.
What am I missing about NATO?
Sean Kay: To be accurate, I have studied NATO for parts of the last three decades. I did my first real writing on NATO issues in 1987 — when I went to London and worked on a research paper on the INF treaty — interviewing people at IISS who had been part of that process.
I also had the wonderful opportunity to be a student of Professor Lawrence Kaplan, the preeminent NATO historian, and also to have Dr. Jamie Shea of NATO sit on my MA thesis on the alliance.
That transitioned to my Ph.D. dissertation and my first book, NATO and the Future of European Security, which was published in 1997, not long after I did a short stint on NATO policy issues in the government in
Washington.
That said, I’ve certainly been lucky to see both with an academic distance and at times up close in Brussels and Washington, some of the major issues confronting the alliance as it has transitioned from the end of the Cold War.
I think those are all the hot spots for the current debate on NATO alright. If there is something missing it is that these are all important in-box problems but they are immediate manifestations of a much more structural dilemma where the real solution lies in Washington, D.C. The United States today is paying a very high price for clinging to its primacy in European security affairs through NATO for the last 20 years.
Secretary of Defense Gates was of course right to draw attention to the utter unsustainability of the disproportionate sharing of burdens NATO. However, that wasn’t new.
And he, I think, failed to recognize the core reality — which is that the Europeans are making huge gains in this situation. If they can get away with us subsidizing 75 percent of their security costs, why on Earth should they want to change that? These are states, with interests, and with voters who elect their leaders. This is a big win for them — if we think they would change that because we ask them to, then we kid ourselves — especially while the Europeans also rightly recognize that the major challenges confronting their interests today are economic — i.e. their debt crisis.
All of these points raise a much more fundamental question about America and its global position. If we are upset that the United States subsidizes so much of Europe’s defense costs, then we need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves. ‘What have we done to contribute to this?’
Washington has had “red lines” of no duplication between NATO and the European Union. It’s high time that ended. The United States needs a massive global force structure review and an entirely new National Security Strategy that guides a new QDR.
The economy is obviously what drives this — but even without the economic issues as the primary challenge for America’s global power position — there is no convincing argument for keeping the NATO dynamics as they are. If, 60– plus years after World War II, and 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the United States can’t hand over the lead responsibility for the European operations to its best friends and partners in the world, where can we disengage from?
As you say, the US has been jawboning its allies since the 1950s to do more on defense spending. If we think that, absent any serious conventional threat to them, that now they would — if we think that — then it is us who has to rethink. If we want more from Europe, we have to change the basis of their incentives. We should, in my view, make a clear statement that in a well managed way, over the next five years, we will begin a major transfer of US led NATO assets over to the European Union. We would work with the European Union to help achieve this.
I am not so naive to think they will make an EU army. But all the things that are good in NATO — the information sharing, planning, headquarters, exercising — there is nothing in NATO there that can’t and shouldn’t be done instead by the EU.
Let the NATO flag come down on the new headquarters in Brussels and the EU flag come up. I would go as far as to relocate major US commands like EUCOM to the continental United States as part of a major force structure review. If CENTCOM can run two wars from Florida, I find the logic pretty thin that with a peaceful environment in Europe it can’t be done from, say, Norfolk.
To my mind the most interesting case for this comes from history. When NATO was founded, its members were at its greatest risk (1948–1950) of Soviet invasion. But NATO succeeded in deterring that — and it did that without a headquarters, without a staff, without an integrated military command, even without a Secretary General or permanent meetings.
The structural ties between the US and its allies were what mattered. We need to get NATO back to that — –as a bedrock foundation of a reserve policy of collective defense, while the baton of security management in and around the European area is finally handed over to our allies and friends whom we can trust the most.
This is essential to getting the US back into global balance economically and militarily while also keeping those basic foundations of the transatlantic community in place. Amazingly to me, the most important strategic question — how to align NATO for a declining American global role — was not even considered in NATO’s new “strategic concept” last year.
That makes it very hard for me to take serious much of anything that would come out of Brussels or Washington on this issue. We need a major conceptual change — and the leadership for this has to come from Washington.
That, I think, is what is missing.
(cont'd) http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2011/07/01/kilo-alpha-yankee/
Richard :munchin
Kilo Alpha Yankee
LineOfDeparture, 1 Jul 2011
Today, our guest is Dr. Sean Kay, the Professor of Politics and Government and Chair of International Studies at Ohio Wesleyan University.
The thing about Sean is that he’s a whiz about several things most people don’t master singularly — missile policy, NATO, Irish economics and politics — and he has the added gift of being able to explain these complex issues to a layman like me.
The highest compliment I can ever pay anyone is “competent,” and if you read either his essays or his latest book on Ireland, Celtic Revival? The Rise, Fall and Renewal of Global Ireland, you’ll share that opinion.
He’s also on sabbatical, which means I could grab him after a 12-mile run and a cup of coffee. Irish luck for us!
Prine of Departure: Dia dhuit, Sean.
I thought we might begin by discussing NATO, a subject you’ve been studying now for three decades.
Everyone is focused on the alliance for three main reasons today: 1) An ongoing war in Afghanistan which has dragged our European friends into an unpopular conflict; 2) NATO’s leadership in the ongoing war against Libya’s government in Tripoli; and, 3) Secretary of Defense Bob Gates and his recent speech excoriating NATO members for failing to live up to his notions of their defense obligations.
I guess I’m reading this in different ways than most people. I hear from our European chums that the strategic calculus for them in Afghanistan — that the war over there will make them safer from terrorism — is the exact opposite of what transpired, and their people know it.
Moreover, NATO’s war in Libya is very unpopular to Americans! And complaining about defense spending by NATO members has dogged the alliance for, well, its entire existence.
What am I missing about NATO?
Sean Kay: To be accurate, I have studied NATO for parts of the last three decades. I did my first real writing on NATO issues in 1987 — when I went to London and worked on a research paper on the INF treaty — interviewing people at IISS who had been part of that process.
I also had the wonderful opportunity to be a student of Professor Lawrence Kaplan, the preeminent NATO historian, and also to have Dr. Jamie Shea of NATO sit on my MA thesis on the alliance.
That transitioned to my Ph.D. dissertation and my first book, NATO and the Future of European Security, which was published in 1997, not long after I did a short stint on NATO policy issues in the government in
Washington.
That said, I’ve certainly been lucky to see both with an academic distance and at times up close in Brussels and Washington, some of the major issues confronting the alliance as it has transitioned from the end of the Cold War.
I think those are all the hot spots for the current debate on NATO alright. If there is something missing it is that these are all important in-box problems but they are immediate manifestations of a much more structural dilemma where the real solution lies in Washington, D.C. The United States today is paying a very high price for clinging to its primacy in European security affairs through NATO for the last 20 years.
Secretary of Defense Gates was of course right to draw attention to the utter unsustainability of the disproportionate sharing of burdens NATO. However, that wasn’t new.
And he, I think, failed to recognize the core reality — which is that the Europeans are making huge gains in this situation. If they can get away with us subsidizing 75 percent of their security costs, why on Earth should they want to change that? These are states, with interests, and with voters who elect their leaders. This is a big win for them — if we think they would change that because we ask them to, then we kid ourselves — especially while the Europeans also rightly recognize that the major challenges confronting their interests today are economic — i.e. their debt crisis.
All of these points raise a much more fundamental question about America and its global position. If we are upset that the United States subsidizes so much of Europe’s defense costs, then we need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves. ‘What have we done to contribute to this?’
Washington has had “red lines” of no duplication between NATO and the European Union. It’s high time that ended. The United States needs a massive global force structure review and an entirely new National Security Strategy that guides a new QDR.
The economy is obviously what drives this — but even without the economic issues as the primary challenge for America’s global power position — there is no convincing argument for keeping the NATO dynamics as they are. If, 60– plus years after World War II, and 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the United States can’t hand over the lead responsibility for the European operations to its best friends and partners in the world, where can we disengage from?
As you say, the US has been jawboning its allies since the 1950s to do more on defense spending. If we think that, absent any serious conventional threat to them, that now they would — if we think that — then it is us who has to rethink. If we want more from Europe, we have to change the basis of their incentives. We should, in my view, make a clear statement that in a well managed way, over the next five years, we will begin a major transfer of US led NATO assets over to the European Union. We would work with the European Union to help achieve this.
I am not so naive to think they will make an EU army. But all the things that are good in NATO — the information sharing, planning, headquarters, exercising — there is nothing in NATO there that can’t and shouldn’t be done instead by the EU.
Let the NATO flag come down on the new headquarters in Brussels and the EU flag come up. I would go as far as to relocate major US commands like EUCOM to the continental United States as part of a major force structure review. If CENTCOM can run two wars from Florida, I find the logic pretty thin that with a peaceful environment in Europe it can’t be done from, say, Norfolk.
To my mind the most interesting case for this comes from history. When NATO was founded, its members were at its greatest risk (1948–1950) of Soviet invasion. But NATO succeeded in deterring that — and it did that without a headquarters, without a staff, without an integrated military command, even without a Secretary General or permanent meetings.
The structural ties between the US and its allies were what mattered. We need to get NATO back to that — –as a bedrock foundation of a reserve policy of collective defense, while the baton of security management in and around the European area is finally handed over to our allies and friends whom we can trust the most.
This is essential to getting the US back into global balance economically and militarily while also keeping those basic foundations of the transatlantic community in place. Amazingly to me, the most important strategic question — how to align NATO for a declining American global role — was not even considered in NATO’s new “strategic concept” last year.
That makes it very hard for me to take serious much of anything that would come out of Brussels or Washington on this issue. We need a major conceptual change — and the leadership for this has to come from Washington.
That, I think, is what is missing.
(cont'd) http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2011/07/01/kilo-alpha-yankee/